An isight into what is obtainable within love hotels in Japan, has emerged.
Mertro UK reports that ‘The fully automated hotels, rabuhos are completely devoid of personnel to grant visitors the utmost privacy and anonymity- provide a window of opportunity for furtive lunchtime quickies and encounters of financial nature’.
Love hotels became popular from the 1960s onwards due to a lack of privacy in many family homes and there are now around 37,000 of these hotels in Japan.
‘These love hotel epitomise the long held pragmatic separation of sex and love in Japan, still thought to be scandalous and embarrassing in the mind set of Japanese people,’ says Zaza.
‘Yet it is predominantly twenty and thirty-somethings who haven’t yet reached a state of financial independence to move out of their elderly home, that enter these love hotels.
Fascinated by the concept of intimacy in Japan, Belgian photographer Zaza Bertrand created this documentary series, taking the viewer inside the hidden world of Japanese ‘rabuhos’ more commonly known as love hotels.
In these safe havens, Japanese men are free to explore their erotic desires, anonymously and in utter seclusion.
‘Given they often live in tiny houses with paper-thin walls with little to no privacy with their granny in the next room, intimacy is an audacious pursuit.
‘In that regard, in a country which according to cultural critics is experiencing a flight from human intimacy, rabuhos can be seen as a way to escape the yoke of parental control and regain some level of empowerment, if only temporally, Zaza explains.
Japanese people are often assumed to be sexually repressed with a long list of erotic taboos is infinite and an increasing number chooses to forgo romance in favour of a single lifestyle.
‘Relationship phobia and romantic apathy, also known in Japan as celibacy syndrome, reign supreme among a persistently growing group of mostly youngsters.
‘And while even traditional values still abound, the sex industry is the second largest industry in the country,’ Zaza explains.
